Lost Boys of the Sudan Term Paper

When the boys come to America, through the generous efforts of relief organizations, the boys must not just learn a new language but adjust to a society where cars and supermarkets are a way of life. The boys also enter a far more diverse society, where even African-Americans judge skin tone and color differently than their own society. The ethnic conflicts that spawned genocide are not present, but America itself is divided in its own way.

The boys, close-knit at the beginning of the film, grow farther and farther apart as the faster-paced, more spread out American existence divides them. They are not 'lost' in the sense that they have been transported away from a situation that did not offer them a future, but the acculturation process into America is a loss to the children, of their original culture and way of life. Genocide did not kill them, or their culture, but even escaping from genocide they experience a loss of their sense of cultural and national identity.